Have you tested your disaster recovery system?

IT

Lost data and business downtime means lost money. In the event of a cyber-attack, natural disaster or other disruptive event, your business needs to be back up and running as quickly as possible.

Do you have a business continuity plan? Have you tested the disaster recovery element of your IT systems?

In addition to protecting data, you need to protect critical business services. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) helps ensure business continuity by minimising downtime and disruption to customers and employees in the event of an outage.

Have you calculated how much 1 hour’s downtime would cost?

Forrester Research found that the downtime average cost per hour for medium businesses was almost $350,000. Downtime doesn’t just cost you customers, revenue and reputational damage, it also means you’re paying employees who can’t perform their jobs properly.

Why do you need DRaaS?

DRaaS automates the orderly recovery of services. It combines data backup, networking and storage services together with business resilience. DRaaS uses the cloud or a second physical location to act as the target site for replication and recovery of your company’s critical data and applications based on a real-time recovery point.

It doesn’t have to be a natural disaster. More than half of events disrupting businesses are attributable to IT hardware, software or networking failures. An Aberdeen report found that 48% of small business and 64% of mid-sized businesses reported losing data due to power loss.

The costliest element of a data loss incident is downtime. 93% of companies that lost access to data for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within one year – 50% of these filed immediately. (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington).

DRaaS supports regulatory compliance

Having your IT infrastructure disaster recovery services managed by a third party gives you the compliance needed by regulations and auditors. The new Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming in May 2018 requires some businesses to have a director responsible for data recovery. It also requires all organisations to:

Appoint a data controller

Carry out risk assessments

Implement & Test appropriate DR systems to minimise risk

Understand where all data resides

Ensure data is protected

DRaaS – a reality check

A Disaster Recovery plan is only as good as its test results. Having answered the questions for your organisation and built your solution, it’s imperative that you regularly test and refine the service to ensure it completely meets your current business requirements. DRaaS providers don’t take chances, they implement rigorous testing regimes.

When you are asked the question “How would you rate the ability of your business to recover from a disaster or serious interruption?” On a scale of 1 to 10, what would your answer be?